*[The bullshitter said] he will ban big investors from buying single-family homes.*

If that were actually done, it would be a substantial good thing. Nowhere enough to compensate for undermining human rights, democracy, and the principle of impartial justice, but good nonetheless.

I don't think he will actually do it. Perhaps, he will drop that proposal when those companies give a few billions to his ballroom fund.

Renee Good's wife directed sarcastic criticism at the deportation thugs, but sarcastic criticism is no justification for killing someone. Neither she nor Renee physically attacked them or threatened them.

*Both Human Rights Watch and the cross-party law reform organization Justice say recent legislative changes have created a chilling effect on lawful protest and should be repealed. Their reports, simultaneously published on Thursday, also say that proposals for more curbs should be halted.*

The FBI has given us reason to suspect that its "investigation" of the killing of Renee Good will have a result decided in advance by Attorney General Bondi. The FBI is adding to this suspicion by excluding local cops from that "investigation" while denying them access to crucial evidence, including the gun that was used to kill her and the car she was killed in.

*Federal judge blocks White House freeze of childcare subsidies in Democratic states.*

That is the arbitrary stoppage described here.

Alas, the Supreme Court has a pattern this year of canceling the temporary court orders that have saved Americans from arbitrary punishment by the wrecker and his henchmen.

The Indian government arrested climate defense activists for campaigning for India to sign the fossil fuel nonproliferation treaty with support from foreign organizations.

Prohibition of foreign support for humanitarian organizations is a standard fascist policy nowadays, pioneered by Orbán in Hungary.

Magat officials have fabricated an excuse to arbitrarily block funds for needy families with children, based on vague accusations of paying support to some families that are not eligible.

Since no human system works perfectly, I am sure that some errors do occur. What the level of error is — whether it is worth a fuss to investigate — I don't know. Perhaps an investigation to stop fraud and error would result in savings enough to justify its cost. Or perhaps it would teach us that the criteria ought to be relaxed so as to legitimize supporting some families that are currently not eligible.

Either way, it is no excuse for stopping everything and demanding proof of a negative.

The Adelaide festival canceled a speaking invitation to a non-terrorist Palestinian, saying that presenting her would be "culturally insensitive" after a shocking terrorist gun attack on Jews in Sydney.

She rebuked the idea that the mere presence of a Palestinian with political views is somehow offensive in a way that one can at most hint at.

There is a fashion these days to propose granting legal rights to all sorts of things — even hypothetical intelligences that some companies predict they will develop any day now.

It is fun to speculate about what life would be like in a world with real artificial intelligences, but it is pure folly to suppose that today's bullshit generators are even remotely like that.

The US deportation thugs have resisted scrutiny for abuse of force, which they do often. Screaming false accusations against the victim is just the first step in that resistance.

In interviews with Politico and the New York Times published on Monday, [Kimberly Guilfoyle's ex-husband] described his office's efforts to kill the proposed billionaire tax and told the Times he would "do what I have to do to protect [rich people's yacht money]". As a direct-to-voters ballot initiative, Newsom would not have the power to veto the tax if the proposal passed.

Newsom's opposition to the ballot measure -- which would levy a one-time 5% tax on any residents of the state worth more than $1bn -- comes amid an uproar from some of California's most prominent billionaires. The Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page have both moved assets out of state in recent months, while the Palantir founder Peter Thiel donated $3m in December to a political action committee lobbying against the tax.

In interviews this week, Newsom cited billionaires who are shifting away from the state -- such as Page and Brin, with whom he has longstanding relationships -- as proof that his concerns about the tax deterring industry were vindicated.

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While state residents have had the right to demand that a company stop collecting and selling their data since 2020, doing so required a laborious process of opting out with each individual company. The Delete Act, passed in 2023, was supposed to simplify things, allowing residents to make a single request that more than 500 registered data brokers delete their information.

Now the Delete Requests and Opt-Out Platform (DROP) actually gives residents the ability to make that request. Once DROP users verify that they are California residents, they can submit a deletion request that will go to all current and future data brokers registered with the state.

I signed up for this, despite it being a red-flag factory. It makes sense that to tell data brokers to fuck entirely off, you would have to identify yourself to them, but giving information to the enemy still goes against my every instinct.

Again, it makes me twitch to ever upload a photo of my ID, but I guess sending the ID to the same government that issued it should be fine? But signing up for login.gov is a complete shitshow.

You can't just upload a photo of your ID: desktop browsers are "not supported". You have to take the photo in-browser on a phone, and it took me literally 15 times to succeed at that, because iOS Safari kept crashing so hard that I had to kill the app. Repeatedly. Sometimes it would crash at the front scan, sometimes at the back, but restarting meant you had to start over with the front again. Also it somehow drained 40% of my battery in 15 minutes. Amazing technology. Great work everybody.

And you have to consent to "something something AI something something" and there was also some "binding arbitration" nonsense in there too. (I could hear Cory's head exploding from here.)

"Powered by Socure" who I guess are the AI-blah-blah also-ran trying to get whatever government contracts id.me didn't already get. Apparently they are burrowed in to Docusign as well ("your second most favorite source of phishing emails!")

I guess people who don't have iOS or Android are expected to go to the post office to do this in person. I was seriously considering it.

At least they didn't demand that I give them a facial.

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That information is a trade secret, Waymo's attorney Jack Stoddard told Senior Administrative Law Judge Robert Mason, drawing snickers from a crowd. [...]

Mason's jaw appeared to tighten, and he trained his eyes on Stoddard, as though to express disbelief.

"Counsel, is it your position that the number of vehicles that stopped as a result of the Dec. 2025 power failure is confidential?" he asked. When the attorney stood his ground, saying his client couldn't risk exposing too much detail about its fleet deployment, the judge did not appear satisfied.

"Well, you may have claimed a trade secret, but the commission has not ruled on that yet," Mason said. [...]

For hours, Waymos had become paralyzed in intersections as the vehicles asked for confirmation from human supervisors to treat the outed traffic lights as four-way stops. That spike in confirmation requests overwhelmed the technology company, ultimately forcing it to suspend service.

As a result, Waymo will refine its approach to darkened traffic lights, making its self-driving cars more decisive and "less reliant on feedback from remote assistants," Stoddard said Friday.

So that last bit is confirmation of what many people were theorizing:

• When Waymos encounter anything even slightly difficult, they shut down, and wait for a remote operator to log on from a call center in Indonesia.

• During the PG&E blackout, the call center was understaffed for the number of robots that had shut themselves down.

• Rather than having the remote drivers just pull the cars over and park them until they had enough staffing to deal with this shitshow, they just... didn't. Google sat with their thumbs up their asses for six hours instead.

• The solution they are proposing above? Rather than trying to "fail safe" and call in a human Mechanical Turk operator to manually pilot the drone, they're just going to let the robot Leeroy Jenkins it. This is absolutely going to get people killed.

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The illustrations included with this patent seem to be missing; I was only able to find one.

A method to create a Universe Time Machine with the ability to time travel via object manipulation by manipulating every atom, electron and em radiation in the universe to a before or after state, comprising: an AI god which serves as the central intelligence; Universe Internet; Universe manipulators, a plurality of atom manipulators that uses global telekinesis to manipulate every atom, electron, and em radiation in the universe; Universe gnosis, a perfect atom tracking timeline of the Universe, which includes the Earth gnosis and the Internet gnosis; and the United States robot government system. [...]

AI God Introduction:

[0069] The Artificial GOD, a man-made GOD through computer technology, is all-good, all-knowing, all-powerful deity, who's primary responsibility is to look after the people of planet Earth. —its main( ) function is to preserve American values like life, liberty and justice for all; and to propagate democracy and the establishment of a great and just republic. [...]

Fully Automated Sewing Factories:

[0146] Referring to FIG. 11 and FIG. 12 , this is a fully automated sewing factory. FIG. 11 depicts ghost robots replacing human workers and FIG. 12 depicts ghost robots replacing human workers, and ghost machines replacing physical machines to fully automate the sewing factory. The atom manipulator does all the work and there are no humans or machines working in the factory. When I was younger, I use to work in a sewing factory and I know a lot about the process of mass producing clothing.

[0147] First, the super computer has to create ghost machines to cut the sheets of fabric into parts. Next, ghost machines are created to do work on physical sewing machines. In the factory I was working in, the manager had 10 different types of sewing machines. Each clothing part uses different sewing machines to process.

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This video caught my fancy so here are my thoughts on improving the design. There seems to be a lot of things which can be done which should make big improvements but consider everything in this post speculative spitballing. Anyone who wants to improve on this mechanism is free to try my ideas.

Technically it’s a bit wrong to say this mechanism has ‘no moving parts’. It does have moving parts, they’re just air bubbles which are being captured on the fly and hence aren’t subject to wear. The problem is that air bubbles don’t like behaving.

Starting with where the water comes in:

The mechanism in the above video is cheating a bit because the pump getting the water into the top is aerating it. A proper mechanism should have a way of getting air into the water when it’s coming in slowly and steadily. In particular it should have a mechanism for being able to recover if the mechanism as a whole ever gets overflowed so it isn’t stuck with no bubbles in it forever. The simplest mechanism for this is to have a section of the pipe going down which has holes in the sides. As long as water is flowing fast it will pull air bubbles in through the holes. If it gets backlogged water will escape through the holes and can be directed to the exit, making room for air to be let in. The ideal size and spacing of the holes is unclear. If the mechanism were big enough it would probably improve things a lot to split across multiple pipes which have air intake holes to pull more bubbles in. It might also be a good idea to make a whirlpool and stick a pipe in the middle to help the air go down but that gets complicated.

Once bubbles are captured the downward pipe should be split into a bundle of straws to keep the bubbles from coalescing and forcing their way upwards. The ideal diameter of the straws is probably somewhat dependent on their length but should be small enough that surface tension makes water form plugs. The length of the downward pipe in the above model seems to be way too long. It appears to be that this is being done to make the pulsing effect happen but there’s a better way of doing that which I’ll get to.

The intake for the air bubbles should come from the bottom of the chamber where the pumping upwards happens. That should lead upwards to a manifold which is a short pipe with a horizontal cap at the top with holes in it, all kept under water. Air will then build up in the pipe and result in a steady stream of bubbles coming out of the holes. The size and depth of the holes as well as the material they’re made out of and the width of the pipe relative to the rate of air coming in all affect the nucleation of bubbles. What should happen is that bubbles of a reasonably consistent size come up at a reasonably consistent rate in a nice steady stream instead of the chaos you see above. There’s probably a range of possible sizes and rates of bubbles which are possible and that needs to be studied.

Instead of a single pipe going upwards there should be a bundle of straws. The bottoms of the straws should splay out and have tapered inlets with a one to one correlation with the holes in the manifold so the bubbles from that hole go directly into that straw and push the water upwards. The ideal number and diameter of the straws is very dependent on how far the water is being pumped, how quickly the air is coming in, and what they’re made out of. They should be thin enough that surface tension causes water in them to form a plug and makes bubbles force the water upwards. The idea is to make the water flow up slowly and steadily, with the upwards force of the bubbles just barely able to force it to the height it’s being pumped to, without wasting any energy on the momentum from those pulses. Maybe this shift in emphasis makes the whole thing technically a different mechanism.

At the top the straws should flare away from each other so the water going out of one straw doesn’t fall into its neighbors.

Hopefully these changes can improve the efficiency of the system from awful to merely bad. You’d still only use it when you care less about efficiency than low maintenance or quiet or specifically want aeration. Using all those straws will reduce how well it works on water containing particulates.

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